Grand Tetons and Jackson Hole

We dallied about and left Lander quite late - waffling a bit on whether to stay or go. It would have been an easy choice to stay if we weren't running out of time before we have reservations near Livingston, and we had both Grand Teton and Yellowstone to see in the next 5 days. So we finally left around noon, and drove up through the Indian Reservation, which is quite beautiful, and along the Wind River. The Wind River is well-named! Devin was fighting the wind all day, which makes the motorhome act like a giant sail. We drove through Dubois, "Valley of the Warm Winds," which is cute in a tacky tourism sort of way, over the Continental Divide again - this time a 9,658 foot pass through mountains, and down into the Jackson Hole area.

The Jackson Hole valley is incredible - reminiscent of the Eastern Sierra, with a broad flat valley with the Snake River winding through it and the Tetons jutting up suddenly to the west. We saw 3 different herds of bison on the way in, and some pronghorn. We arrived at the Gros Ventre (pronounced "grow-vahnt") Campground, near Kelly and the Teton Science School (where I took a winter ecology course a few years ago - the place looks quite different covered in snow at 15 below zero!). The Campground is very pleasant and quiet - we chose a site in a "no generators" loop with a view of the Tetons over a ridge, surrounded by Cottonwoods and Willows and Sagebrush. It is very quiet - birds are singing, and we may see bears and moose while we are here! Tonight we are going into Jackson for dinner. I better get dressed...

We found a nice little Thai restaurant off of the main street, and it was quite delicious.

The next day, I (Maggie) stayed home in bed and rested all day as I had an eye infection that caused my eyelid to swell up. I thought it might just be a clogged duct, or allergies, so I took Benadryl and soaked it in hot compresses. Devin went out exploring, went back into Jackson, went grocery shopping, shipped off a faulty charge controller for our solar panels (we are boondocking on only half of them now, but it is enough). He drove up Gros Ventre road to the slide - a very large landslide that probably dammed the river when it occured. There is a guest ranch up there that looks awfully nice, and the river looks like a perfect fly fishing river.

The day after we arrived, I finally decided I needed to see a doctor about my eye - it wasn't getting better so was probably an infection. I went to the emergency room - another nice small resort town hospital experience with a cowboy doctor. Got antibiotics and eyedrops, and we had lunch at a great little tacqueria (Pica's). Afterwards, we drove up into the National Park, saw more bison, a couple more pronghorn, a black bear, a moose and an elk. The Black bear was a radio collared yearling that was browsing in the bushes off the main road, resulting in a bear jam. Bunches of tourists with cars blocking the road, out of their cars, practically chasing the bear to get photos and movies. I can't blame them for wanting to see a bear, but it just made me sad. The young bear was obviously already in trouble, wasn't running from people like a "good bear" and all those folks helping it to stay habituated were practically signing its death warrant.

Bears are wonderful creatures - objects of both our fascination and our fear, each of which emotions feeds the other. They are near mythical symbols of the wild, and yet we destroy that wildness in trying to get close to it. Paradoxically cuddly stuffed toys and slavering monsters, depending on the light and distance they are viewed from, bears probably feed our imaginings and longings of wilderness more than any other animal. Long may they roam the wild places of the world, unmolested. Maybe people will learn, someday, that they are merely wild animals, struggling to survive, following instinct and learning, fellow travelers on the planet - neither wild pets nor monsters - unless we make them so.

We drove down a "scenic drive" along Jenny Lake - ha. The main road is MUCH more scenic! You can see all of the Tetons and Jackson Hole from the main roads through the valley, but this "scenic" drive was down in a swale, surrounded by trees and you couldn't even see the mountains! It did go by an overlook of Jenny Lake that was nice, but that's the only scenic part. They should re-name it from "scenic drive" to "road to scenic viewpoint" or something. We thought it was rather funny.

We checked out Coulter Bay Campground off Jackson Lake - it is the other large campground in the Tetons that generally has camping available. The Gros Ventre campground is MUCH nicer! We made the right choice staying here. The sites in Coulter Bay are almost all pull-throughs right on the campground road, and very close to each other. It is in the pines, and each loop looked like a parking lot for RV's with both sides lined with motorhomes and trailers. They had a "no generators" section, but it wouldn't accomodate RV's longer than 27 feet, according to the sign, so we would have been stuck with the big monster RV's running their diesel generators all day - ick. We are camped in a "no generators" loop in the Gros Ventre campground that is open to anyone, as long as they don't run a generator. We really love having our solar panels and not ever needing to run our generator - they are noisy, stinky and obnoxious. Also, the campsites here are very spread out, and it is so large it never fills up, so the spots closest to us have never had anyone in them. As a result, it is very quiet here and we've been enjoying the wind in the Cottonwoods and the birds singing. Robins, Flickers, Bluebirds, Peewees, sparrows, finches and more. It's very peaceful.

The moose we saw was in an oxbow of the Snake River, pretty far from the road, but very picturesque. We'll see lots more in Canada and Alaska no doubt. And the single elk we saw was along the highway coming home, a doe grazing on a bluff overlooking the Snake River. So now we've seen quite the variety of wildlife here in Jackson Hole - tons of Bison, several Pronghorn, Trumpeter Swans and a Sandhill Crane and Canada Geese on the Elk Refuge, and the singles: bear, moose and elk.

While we were up at Coulter Bay, we stopped at the store to get a few things and Devin found the book he had read years ago while staying at a friend's cabin in Kelly's Camp in Glacier National Park. His friend gave him "Night of the Grizzlies" to read, about two separate Grizzly Bear maulings and killings that happened on the same night in Glacier in 1967. Some friend, huh? Ha. Devin said he was already nervous about bears, and then he couldn't put that book down, and it all happened right near where he was sleeping outside - I bet he didn't sleep at all! I figured I should read it, too, since he has talked about it and we are heading up into Grizzly country (there are Grizzlies here, too - some areas were closed due to bear danger). So we bought it, and like Devin, I wasn't able to put it down until I had read the whole thing. It read like a Jon Krakauer book - giving lots of background details, and painting the larger picture of the setting of the park itself, the bears, and the park service mission, as well as observations of folks with cabins in Kelly's Camp, with folks new to the park like the manager of Granite Chalet (who fed the bears nightly), and other campers. It is so easy to see how the NPS was complacent about the danger of bears - no one had ever been killed by a Grizzly in the park up to that time, and there were lots of people-bear interactions. It was at the end of the open dump era, but some places still had no other options and the bears ate their garbage nightly. It was a tragic tale, not just for the two young women, both park concession employees, who were killed, but for the bears themselves. In the end, I ended up crying for the loss of wildness that dead Grizzlies represent as much as for the tragic loss of lives, and the horrible guilt and second guessing that plagued the survivors and would-be rescuers. I am glad there are still Grizzlies in a few places in the lower 48 - a few places wild enough to still contain them.

My friend Shelton Johnson, a Yosemite Ranger, has used Faust as a metaphor for Grizzlies - replacing hell with wilderness and the devil with the bears - "Where I am, there is wilderness, and where there is wilderness, there I am." In an equally spiritual metaphor, Aldo Leopold, famous naturalist and author of A Sand County Almanac, stated, "There seems to be a tacit assumption that if grizzlies survive in Canada and Alaska, that is good enough. It is not good enough for me. Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness to heaven; one may never get there." Heaven or hell, wilderness is a necessity to our spirit. Wallace Stegner said,

"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of wild species into zoos or extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will [we] be free from noise, the exhuasts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. for it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

And back to Aldo Leopold, who said, "The richest values of the wilderness lie not in the days of Daniel Boone, nor even in the present, but rather in the future."

What will we do to keep the remaining bits wild? Is it possible? I hope so.